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The next challenge of course is to get the major software manufacturers to use said product - we're facing inertia worthy of an aircraft carrier in dry dock.

In the meanwhile, the demand for high-powered games is still there, and will grow. As a minority market, we have to accept the fact that the major manufacturers in this market (games) will not go out of their way to meet our needs (not yet anyway), and yet will be happy enough to take our money.

We therefore have to be extra creative, and provide solutions for ourselves that meet our needs. WINE is an example of this - providing compatibility from the bottom upwards (Win32 environment for unchanged Windows binaries) as opposed to providing compatibility from the top downwards (targeting games for SDL+OpenGL on GNU/Linux, for example).

On that note, and inspired from your comment regarding Windows market share, I'd like to run an idea past you guys.

Earlier I mentioned about Xen-aware video drivers, and installing Windows under Xen, but what about a chimaera? What about making WINE Xen-aware?

I would not know if this was possible, but the hoped-for end result would be that a user could install the game and the Windows-native video drivers under WINE. I suppose WINE would run as a kind of "single process domU" and would take advantage of VT-d (directed I/O).

Assuming of course that the dom0 drivers were Xen-aware also, the Windows drivers could send instructions that would execute directly on the hardware.

Initially it'd probably need a separate GPU (and corresponding X session), and would probably work best on an *X2-type card - one monitor output. Eventually, it would evolve so that you'd only need one X session, and perhaps even run a DirectX application in a window - here's hoping.

Anyway, the upshot is that you get to run DirectX games at full speed, or as near to it as your going to get AND you don't have to buy a copy of Windows. How good is that?